How to Practice the Skill of Agency

It's actually something you can learn.

Agency is the ability to get what you want out of life, and my pursuit begins with two premises:

The first is that agency is a learnable skill. In How to Be More Agentic, Cate Hall shares her belief that “most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard.” She goes further in arguing that this should be assumed, and the real work is coming up with a plan:

Whatever it is, assume it can be learned and that the task is to figure out the best way to do it.

That leads me to my second premise: practice is the best way to acquire a skill. Tyler Cowen, in a blog post from 2019, writes about the value of training like an athlete or musician, saying this:

Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?” If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?

So that’s where I begin– with a belief that agency is something I can learn, and the best approach is to practice. It’s a simple set of ideas that I think intelligent people often fail to take seriously. But don’t be fooled; these are powerful ideas, and I consider them essential building blocks of my project.

In the rest of this post, I’ll lay out a list of concrete, actionable ideas for practicing the skill of high agency. The listing is an agglomeration of several sources mixed in with my own ideas. Think of it as a catalog of ingredients that make up the recipe for agency. These are micro-sklls, beliefs, and habits that collectively help someone become the kind of person who gets more of what they want out of life.

I’ll add my references to the bottom of this post for you to explore. Behold, my list of agentic ingredients:

• Boldly ask for things.

  • Send more cold emails.

  • Ask for things to the point of rejection.

  • Proactively hold difficult conversations.

  • Follow-up with polite persistence.

  • Figure out who can help you get where you want to go faster.

  • Balance all of this with respect, decency, and a generous spirit.

• Expand your network.

  • Relationships allow you to grow through multiplication instead of addition.

  • Find a way to draw like-minded people towards yourself.

  • Put yourself in positions to benefit from serendipity.

• Develop a bias towards action.

  • Don’t wait for permission.

  • Remove friction to help you move faster.

  • Don’t waste the activation energy of inspiration; start now.

  • Always know what the next step is.

• Don’t worry about how you look. 

  • Ask simple, direct questions with sincerity.

  • Ignore early feelings of doubt.

• Think outside the box.

  • Take simple and extreme ideas seriously.

  • Expose yourself to a broader set of options.

• Shape your environment so it shapes you.

  • Seek out mentors that you want to impress.

  • Find a group of like-minded peers and feed off their energy.

  • Engineer a rapid feedback loop.

• Assume everything is learnable.

  • Cultivate optimism and self-confidence: “I’ll figure it out”

  • Approach self-improvement earnestly.

• Don’t let burnout destroy your momentum.

  • Don’t rely (merely) on willpower and working more hours.

  • Find an edge or point of leverage and push.

  • Stay hungry and maintain your energy levels.

• Solve problems in front of you.

  • Remove obstacles in your way.

  • Fix things that annoy you.

  • Improve things that you care about.

• Fight against complacency.

  • Lean into your unique/weird qualities.

  • Talk to interesting strangers.

  • Make a step-by-step plan to obtain what you want.

  • Take more risks in the direction of your goals.

  • Have ambitious plans and timelines.

  • Live with a sense of urgency.

  • Take on personal projects.

• Think independently.

  • Be decisive to the point of danger.

  • Avoid “shoulds”; instead, do what you like or must.

  • Know what it is that you want.

  • Trust your own experiences and observations.

• Live with autonomy.

  • Take as much autonomy as the world will give you.

  • Don’t be bound by the “best” way if there’s a way you like better.

  • Shape your physical and digital spaces to your preference.

• Gain control over your emotions.

  • Learn to speak to your emotions on a meta-level.

  • Realize that you can negotiate with yourself.

  • Realize that you can do things you don’t initially feel like doing.

Here are a few links that inspired this post:

• Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic - Effective Altruism Forum

• How to be More Agentic - Useful Fictions

• Things you're allowed to do - Milan Cvitkovic

• Hammertime Day 1: Bug Hunt - Radimentary

• Speed matters - James Somers

• Ten Ways to Live a Less Complacent Life - Tyler Cowen, Linkedin

• How Complacent Are You? Take the Quiz! - Tyler Cowen

• There’s No Speed Limit - Derek Sivers

• What’s Stopping You? - Neel Nanda

• How I practice at what I do - Marginal Revolution